Joan Miró The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) Montroig, July 1923-winter 1924

  • MoMA, Floor 5, 517 The Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries

Joan Miró’s The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) may seem abstract, but a closer look reveals a landscape populated with a rich assortment of human and animal figures and natural forms that together comprise an iconography of the artist’s life. The hunter, standing at the left side of the composition, has a stick figure body and a triangular head. A pipe protrudes just to the right of his bushy mustache, and his heart floats near his chest. In one hand he holds a freshly killed rabbit, in the other, a gun still smoking from the kill. This hunter figure is a stand-in for Miró, and it appears in many of his other works.

Miró’s landscape evokes life on his family’s farm in Montroig, Catalonia, Spain. A politically autonomous region near Spain’s border with France, Catalonia maintains its own parliament, language, history, and culture. Catalan nationalism has been a subject of debate for more than a century. Perhaps hinting at this contentious history, Miró depicts the French, Catalan, and Spanish flags in the background. In the foreground, he writes the word “sard,” short for “Sardana,” Catalonia’s national dance. This truncated word also references the fragmented letters and words of the Dadaist and Surrealist poetry by which he was influenced.

In 1923, Miró moved from Montroig to Paris. The move meant a transition from painting directly from nature to working indoors, in a studio. A few years later, he explained the impact this location change had on his work: “I have managed to escape into the absolute nature, and my landscapes have nothing in common anymore with outside reality….”

Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
25 1/2 x 39 1/2" (64.8 x 100.3 cm)
Credit
Purchase
Object number
95.1936
Copyright
© 2024 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Department
Painting and Sculpture

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Provenance Research Project

This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.

The artist, Montroig
Jacques Viot (Galerie Pierre), Paris. [Acquired from the artist]
André Breton, Paris. Acquired from Viot, by June 1925
Simone Breton (formerly Simone Kahn, later Simone Collinet), Paris. 1929 – 1936
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased from Simone Collinet, through Pierre Matisse, December 1936

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